October 22, 2016

October 21, 2016

The iPhone 8 rumor mill, spurred on by a ceramic Apple Watch, is predicting a ceramic iPhone. The problem is there are several issues with that .. particularly if Apple's design philosophy of pure materials rather than facades still holds.. Manufacturing guru Greg Koenig takes a fascinating crack at rumor debunking.

October 19, 2016

Standing out in such an environment is not easy. Car design is less restricted, but still, every decade, you see car designs react to new technologies and new regulations and end up in a place where they become forgettable. This is not true of Porsche. As one Porsche design expert is said to have told his underlings, “You are not here to design the most beautiful sports car, you are here to design the best Porsche.” The design language of the Porsche brand is “iconic.”

In 1947, Porsche began work on its 356. In many ways it was like the original iPhone. It wasn’t perfect. It was underpowered. But it was streamlined and aerodynamic. From the 356 to the 911, a distinctive marriage of form, function, design, and brand ruled every design. It became the core around which Porsche was built.

September 02, 2016

Smarter clothing, not with wires and microprocessors, but with engineered fabrics. Work on the thermal characteristics of textiles. It's a distance away .. it has to work, be inexpensive, comfortable and attractive - a tall order to fill.

Thermal management through personal heating and cooling is a strategy by which to expand indoor temperature setpoint range for large energy saving. We show that nanoporous polyethylene (nanoPE) is transparent to mid-infrared human body radiation but opaque to visible light because of the pore size distribution (50 to 1000 nanometers). We processed the material to develop a textile that promotes effective radiative cooling while still having sufficient air permeability, water-wicking rate, and mechanical strength for wearability. We developed a device to simulate skin temperature that shows temperatures 2.7° and 2.0°C lower when covered with nanoPE cloth and with processed nanoPE cloth, respectively, than when covered with cotton. Our processed nanoPE is an effective and scalable textile for personal thermal management.

Also Blanche Davis, my (step) mother-in-law, passed at 101 and 9 months. A long and remarkable life. She kept her faculties nearly until the end. There aren't many who were born before women got the vote in the US.

AbstractThe attire of the Tyrolean Iceman, a 5,300-year-old natural mummy from the Ötzal Italian Alps, provides a surviving example of ancient manufacturing technologies. Research into his garments has however, been limited by ambiguity surrounding their source species. Here we present a targeted enrichment and sequencing of full mitochondrial genomes sampled from his clothes and quiver, which elucidates the species of production for nine fragments. Results indicate that the majority of the samples originate from domestic ungulate species (cattle, sheep and goat), whose recovered haplogroups are now at high frequency in today’s domestic populations. Intriguingly, the hat and quiver samples were produced from wild species, brown bear and roe deer respectively. Combined, these results suggest that Copper Age populations made considered choices of clothing material from both the wild and domestic populations available to them. Moreover, these results show the potential for the recovery of complete mitochondrial genomes from degraded prehistoric artefacts.

The concept of "universal design," which posits that designing for the underserved leads to better products for everyone, is a core tenet of Open Style lab's curriculum. Grace Jun, the education director for the lab, says that for every product the fellows develop, they're encouraged to think not only about how it meets the needs of people with a certain disability, but also the potential for it to be adapted to mass market.

Last year, for example, one team developed the Rayn Jacket for their client Ryan DeRoche, who uses a wheelchair after a bike accident left him with a paralyzing spinal cord injury. The weatherproof jacket includes a pouch that doubles as a lap cover—just as useful to bikers in the rain as it is to wheelchair users. The jacket was picked up by the San Francisco-based Betabrand, and is now sold through its online store.